7 ms·

10 graphic examples of the abomination that is iTunes on Windows

72 points by troyhunt 14y ago

rollypolly 14y ago
If you use Windows, Apple secretly hates you.
- sophacles 14y ago
  To be fair, MS Office on Mac has a tendency to fail in extremely frustrating ways too... (Seriously, section references, picture captions/references, toc, all just stop working at a certain document size, if at all, not to mention the freeze at a 100pp thing).
  - gjulianm 14y ago
    I know that maybe you do work that is impossible to do in other suite than Office, but, did you try LaTeX? It manages all the references incredibly good, picture captions, TOC... it requires more work than Office, but I think is more rewarding.
    - sophacles 14y ago
      We regularly use LaTeX when it is internal to our group, but a lot of our partners won't use anything but word. Fortunately it is only a small number of documents that reach the limits with them, but unfortunately they take a disproportionate amount of the joint effort :/. For internal stuff, and papers where our group has sole authorship (and some enlightened partners) we have a very nice set of scripts for auto-generating git repos with all the latex styles and generic skeletons for us.
    - bitwize 14y ago
      Yeah, good luck getting LaTeX to be accepted for interdepartmental correspondence, let alone inter-company. Also, Word can track revision history on each document. What's the equivalent for LaTeX? A git repo? The upshot of network effects is that if you work for anybody but yourself, a Windows PC with a moderately recent Microsoft Office is a requirement.
      - nknight 14y ago
        Well, maybe in whatever line of work you've chosen, or just whatever big company you've decided to work for, but it's never been a requirement for me.
      - gjulianm 14y ago
        If the correspondence does not need to be editable, PDF is the best option, with even less problems than Word or OpenOffice formats. And LaTeX has built-in support for it. I agree with revision history, Word probably manages it pretty good. But git repos aren't a bad option if you are used to them. I personally use Dropbox, so I have a simple revision history without problems. Anyways, I didn't say LaTeX was the perfect solution, that's why I said that he maybe had some impediment to use it instead of Office.
    - EricDeb 14y ago
      I think LaTeX is built for perfectionist, pedantic academics. That is not to say I don't secretly love it, but after spending hours battling the program trying to get it to look right, I usually end up asking myself what's the point?
      - dubya 14y ago
        That sounds like a LaTeX koan. If you really must use LaTeX, eventually you reach the state of just writing the content and to heck with the formatting, or you go nuts and learn to write a proper style file. You are pretty certain not to volunteer to write up the department newsletter with lots of pictures from the spring picnic.
  - hristov 14y ago
    But that is not really fair is it. Apple is not supposed to have good Windows software to do Microsoft a favor. They should have good Windows software to do themselves a favor. Because people will be more likely to use their devices. And if the Windows software is excellent, Windows users will consider an Apple for their next computer. Now a Windows user hears about all the hoopla about how great Apple interfaces are, looks at iTunes and says "that cannot be true".
    - sophacles 14y ago
      My point was more that a company that makes an operating system probably puts it's best devs on the software for that OS. Further, there is probably not a lot of institutional knowledge of the other supported os. Lastly, there is probably some difficulty in getting good applicants with ".Net guys, come work at Apple", or "Objective-C dev? MS is hiring!". It reads like "come work for the enemy".
- pluies_public 14y ago
  Not so secretly apparently.
hristov 14y ago
Here is another example. Every time iTunes needs an update it brings up an automatic updater. Fair enough. I click on update, and the iTunes updater downloads the new version and every single time fails to install it with some generic unhelpful error. Then I have to go and manually download the new version from the website and manually install the new version. And every time a new update comes, I click "update" on the automatic updater hoping that this time they fixed it, but no such luck. I was so happy when iOS started updating without a computer.
gjulianm 14y ago
Another one for the collection: iTunes starts randomly. While doing some work, it suddenly starts up and shows in my screen. With no reason. There's no iPhone in my house. I didn't configure an iPhone with wireless sync with iTunes, and my WiFi is secured (nobody else than me accesed through it). And it still starts randomly, since the update that came with iOS5.
crazygringo 14y ago
Or how about: anything I do in iTunes makes it freeze for five seconds. It's been explained to me that this is because my music collection is around 200GB, so my iTunes Library.xml file is around 60MB, and any action (playing a song, renaming, etc.) rewrites the entire XML file on disk (incrementing play count, renaming, etc.). And this is on a MacBook Air with SSD under Lion!
- evoxed 14y ago
  Yep, this is extremely annoying. For an application that is supposed to catalog my library of media, it's quite inefficient with a large number of items. Without knowing what the possible solutions to this are, all I can say is that there needs to be a distinction between collections of media which are expected to be more reasonable in size (say an album, or one artist's catalog) and libraries which may grow to be quite huge. I have terabytes on external HDs that I won't let iTunes touch for a variety of reasons, leaving it pretty much no function other than to push things to the iPod or AppleTV.
- koenigdavidmj 14y ago
  Whose idea was it to use an XML file for a non-human-readable library file? SQLite would sing in this use case.
  - derefr 14y ago
    There's a regular (possibly SQLite-based) database format as well. The XML file is the backup.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  My friends swear I'm an idiot, despite having written my own music library software because I couldn't stand the others, but I've had the same problem with iTunes being slow as shit. My initial import takes thousands of times the time it takes for other software to do the same thing and it has a nasty habit of "forgetting" where your library is if you don't leave it at the default. I love it, I just reloaded OS X and it keeps trying to start iTunes. Everytime I just deny the TOS and it slinks away. Good riddance.
weff 14y ago
Or the lack of the most basic elements of a media library: folder watching. No, I don't want one folder, I want to watch any folder. Seriously, how fucking complicated is that to implement?
- evoxed 14y ago
  Do you mean just to add media/quickview playlists, or to index the entire library? (assuming the latter) Given the default behavior of organizing all of your media within the iTunes directory, it makes perfect sense and would be a great feature. I'm sure there are other people more qualified to comment, but my first impression of the problem is that without some clever implementation there would be some major speed issues with large libraries.
  - weff 14y ago
    By folder watching, I mean: when I put a multimedia file in in a folder (which I've assigned to be 'watched'), iTunes updates the library. I'm very certain Windows has APIs for exactly this kind of situation. In fact, if they can do it for one folder, I'm having trouble seeing a reason why they wouldn't be able to do it for several folders.
    - evoxed 14y ago
      You can do this with Applescript as a folder action. You can see how to do this here: http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/folderaction01.php http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/folderaction01.php I was thinking that you meant live monitoring, i.e. your library would be a reflection of your directory structure with additional metadata stored in unit sections so that it scales better.
      - weff 14y ago
        It's nice the Applescript exists (although I was talking more about Windows) but again, it's very sad one has to use an Applescript to accomplish this, on Mac. I mean, a solution is out there: very good. Nevertheless, it doesn't justify or excuse iTunes for not having this feature.
grecy 14y ago
<conspiracy theory> Apple is intentionally keeping iTunes on Windows a "sub-par" experience to attract more users to move over to MacOS. I think the majority of non-power don't understand the problem is with iTunes specifically, and would say something like "The whole damn computer sucks". </conspiracy>
- evoxed 14y ago
  0 errors 1 warning: unknown attribute 'theory' in tag 'conspiracy' I actually think I've heard this one before, especially when the software was just being released on Windows...
- jsankey 14y ago
  The biggest problem with this theory is that iTunes is hardly an enjoyable experience on OSX either!
  - dazbradbury 14y ago
    It's only the comments in this thread that have made me realise iTunes is infuriating for everyone. Having never been an Mac OS user, I had always assumed they put all their effort into the Mac version, and then did some kind of nasty port and hacked away until a windows version worked. Not a conspiracy theory, so much as a lack of interest from Apple to make a decent windows version. On windows, I use winamp. It supports my iPod, and actually allows me to listen to and manage my music collection.
    - ImprovedSilence 14y ago
      +1 million for using winamp. By far the thing I miss most from windows. (I'm OSX and Linux all the way these days, but there are things I miss.)
- benologist 14y ago
  I think the conspiracy runs deeper .... they've made iTunes so specifically bad on OS X they're trying to drive users to linux where there is no iTunes at all!
alastairpat 14y ago
To be fair, it's pretty horrid on OS X as well - several of these issues apply cross-platform (iTunes WiFi sync error messages are presented to me on a daily basis running Lion, for example.)
Tomis 14y ago
That happens because Apple believes that whatever comes out of their hands is God's personal gift to mankind. The problem is not the software, the problem is you.
kprobst 14y ago
The one I love is when I create a playlist, verify it has songs in it (on iTunes), sync my iPod and the playlist is empty. Completely empty. Then the duplicate playlists that appear out of nowhere for whatever reason. But they're only duplicated on the device. Then there's the need to use a third-party hack to detect and remove dead tracks, or add new ones when I'm not purchasing musing from iTunes. As far as Apple is concerned, I must purchase my music from them, not from Amazon. So something so mundane as a folder watch isn't needed. It's unfortunate that we love the devices but have no choice but to put up with the horrid crap that is the software.
uslic001 14y ago
Which is why I have been using MediaMonkey as much as I can with my iPhone, iPad, and iPod. I hate when I am forced to use iTunes for an upgrade. It is like going to the dentist.
OzzyB 14y ago
6. Reboot? But I don’t want to reboot! I never understood why it has to have a system reboot either, and I'm on a Mac. I don't like rebooting, I just like to let my Mac sleep!
- replax 14y ago
  Well, they are probably replacing a file which is currently in use on which other files depend on. While there may be other solutions to that problem, rebooting is the least error prone one and people are already used to having to reboot their computer after updates.
  - weff 14y ago
    That's a shitty excuse to reboot; sounds more like they didn't want to bother. If you do your job properly, errors can be handled. If you do your job properly, errors aren't simply hex values. Maybe people were used to reboot their computers 7 years ago but these days, you can entirely work and reboot only for system patches.
    - replax 14y ago
      Yes, you are obviously right. They obviously didn't want to put up with error handling, as you can tell by the crappy error messages they implemented. Basically, they said "fck it, just reboot".
  - kijin 14y ago
    Anyone who uses Windows 7 is definitely not used to having to reboot their computer all the time. Most updates don't need a reboot. Heck, it's even possible to install the entire MS Office Suite and even some Visual Studio components without rebooting. But maybe Apple uses a toolkit that is supposed to be compatible with older versions of Windows as well. In that case, just reboot that dinosaur.
blhack 14y ago
I guess I'm the only one that doesn't have any problems with iTunes on windows, eh?
- Karunamon 14y ago
  Came to say something like this. I know that iTunes is everyone's favorite whipping boy, but with a 10,000 song library on a 5200RPM drive that's at least 6 years old.. I don't seem to be having all of these issues that everyone else does with the Windows iTunes. The worst problem I've had is error codes when trying to wifi sync, and that was solved by just disabling and reenabling the feature.
bluedevil2k 14y ago
The seemingly easiest UI concept is the most annoying. "Apply" != "Save and Immediately Sync". Why is there no way to simply change my settings without syncing?? Another annoying "feature" - iTunes handles syncing everything BUT pictures. Why?? Why do I need to open Windows to drag/drop the files in a folder?
icegreentea 14y ago
I think that several of these problems more or less just apply to windows programs in general. Its no excuse, but just something to keep in mind. Microsoft loves its cryptic error codes too.
navs 14y ago
Examples 2, 3, and 7 are common for me on OSX. I just hate syncing my device. Some of the other problems I've been having: iTunes gives me an alert saying some tracks can not be synced and so the sync process hangs until I close the prompt or manually stop the sync on my iPhone. If I remove a large app on my phone (example: the 1Gb Max Payne game) and then attempt to sync the phone after, iTunes decides to install the app again which means a lengthy transfer of a 1Gb file. If I make a change to my playlist on the phone and sync, two versions of the playlist are created (not always reproducible). iTunes is a horrible horrible experience on either OS. I've given up using it as a music player, in favor of Ecoute[1]. Pity I still need it for my iPhone. [1] http://www.pixiapps.com/ecoute/ http://www.pixiapps.com/ecoute/
jfb 14y ago
People would be surprised at the size of the team that produces the iTunes client.
- politician 14y ago
  1?
- weff 14y ago
  3 squirrels and 1 microbe?
beloch 14y ago
I don't even like iTunes on OSX.
moe 14y ago
At least on windows you have alternatives... I'm still looking for a viable replacement on OSX. Actually scratch that. More urgently I'm seeking a Finder-replacement that doesn't lock up for seconds at a time all the time. In 2012. On a 2 GHz computer. With a SSD. Truly magical!
- shinratdr 14y ago
  Why does it never occur to you people that your machine might have a problem? The Finder constantly locking up is not normal behaviour, no more than Windows Explorer locking up is normal behaviour. Why would you even think otherwise? Seriously, is this HN or YouTube? It's just ridiculous how whiny techs get when it comes to iTunes, OS X and iOS. I can solve an endless stream of technical problems all day with varying requirements and urgency, but syncing my iPhone is such a mystery! Give me a break. Here: Create a new partition on your drive, install a fresh copy of OS X. Does the Finder still lock up? No? What a surprise. OS X is a preferable OS for some people. It's not going to hold your hand and wipe your ass for you FFS, you still need to put in the slightest bit of effort.
- shrike 14y ago
  Check out Path Finder - http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/ http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/. I've been using for a while, it's light years beyond Finder. You can't completely kill Finder, OS X won't allow it but Path Finder makes it a lot better.
- astrange 14y ago
  If that's a third-party SSD, it's probably a hardware problem. You can generate a sysdiagnose report which will contain too much information by pressing ctrl-opt-cmd-shift-. when experiencing a problem. The spindump file inside it is quite readable to a systems programmer and may be helpful.
ntkachov 14y ago
I've always marveled at Apple. They have top notch Engineers working their hardware. They have fantastic Designers. But for some reason. Apple can't get a decent programmer. Their software sucks. Plain down right sucks. I love using apple hardware but I can't stand any software made by them. (See: Xcode, Itunes, Safari)
- sebastianavina 14y ago
  I guess they send all the talented one to the operating system division
  - luriel 14y ago
    OS X is infamous for its bugs. See for example: http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/libev/ev.pod#OS_X_AND_DARWIN_BUGS http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/libev/ev.pod#OS_X_AN...
    - batista 14y ago
      I don't see anything "infamous" here. I see a page with some bugs that affect a specific library. It then goes on to mention bugs for other OSes that affect the same library.
- batista 14y ago
  >But for some reason. Apple can't get a decent programmer. Their software sucks. Plain down right sucks. I love using apple hardware but I can't stand any software made by them. (See: Xcode, Itunes, Safari) If you prefer Emacs/Vim, OK, but I can't see a much better tool than XCode for Objective-C (and arguably C/C++), plus UI building. Version 4 is buggy and crashes, but then again it's a mostly complete rewrite of the old XCode codebase. 4.3 is stabler than previous 4.x releases --it will get better. As for iTunes, I can't see any problem with it, besides handling a lot of different functionality in one app. Do you see many actual bugs in day to day use? Because using it for almost 10 years, I don't remember any. Safari, yes, tend to do some stupid things. Though, Chrome, to which I migrated is also based on Apple code for the core engine. Plus: the OS, Logic, Aperture, Pages, Keynote, all top notch apps.
vacri 14y ago
I haven't used iTunes for quite a while, but my gripe (on Windows at the time) was that it decided what your content was, presumably by file extension. "Please class these files as TV episodes, for my iPod Video, iTunes", to which iTunes would say "sorry, those are movies", and move them into the movie folder... never found out how to stop it from doing that.
JumpCrisscross 14y ago
I actually find the iTunes store on the iPhone to be quite terrible as well. It takes longer than any other app to power up and then greets you with a "Loading..." routine. In case you get over this it will do it again every time you switch to a different item on the menu, e.g. Search. It's like it's not sure of itself and must phone home before displaying the UI to, I don't know, show a user the "Purchased" screen. Same deal with the App Store and Mail apps. All very clunky.
- replax 14y ago
  Indeed! It wouldn't be too much to ask to cache what has been loaded WHILE the app is running, is it? Or even maybe keep it cached w/o the pictures. Hell, they could maybe poll 50 entries instead of 25 and cache it with no problem (excluding graphics). While I am at this, WHY does mobile safari have to reload a page every time i switch tabs/press the home button and instantly power it up again? It's not only hugely annoying on a non 3g device, it also makes no sense, you should at least be able to set an interval/turn it off...

72 points by troyhunt 14y ago

rollypolly 14y ago

If you use Windows, Apple secretly hates you.

sophacles 14y ago
To be fair, MS Office on Mac has a tendency to fail in extremely frustrating ways too... (Seriously, section references, picture captions/references, toc, all just stop working at a certain document size, if at all, not to mention the freeze at a 100pp thing).
- gjulianm 14y ago
  I know that maybe you do work that is impossible to do in other suite than Office, but, did you try LaTeX? It manages all the references incredibly good, picture captions, TOC... it requires more work than Office, but I think is more rewarding.
  - sophacles 14y ago
    We regularly use LaTeX when it is internal to our group, but a lot of our partners won't use anything but word. Fortunately it is only a small number of documents that reach the limits with them, but unfortunately they take a disproportionate amount of the joint effort :/. For internal stuff, and papers where our group has sole authorship (and some enlightened partners) we have a very nice set of scripts for auto-generating git repos with all the latex styles and generic skeletons for us.
  - bitwize 14y ago
    Yeah, good luck getting LaTeX to be accepted for interdepartmental correspondence, let alone inter-company. Also, Word can track revision history on each document. What's the equivalent for LaTeX? A git repo? The upshot of network effects is that if you work for anybody but yourself, a Windows PC with a moderately recent Microsoft Office is a requirement.
    - nknight 14y ago
      Well, maybe in whatever line of work you've chosen, or just whatever big company you've decided to work for, but it's never been a requirement for me.
    - gjulianm 14y ago
      If the correspondence does not need to be editable, PDF is the best option, with even less problems than Word or OpenOffice formats. And LaTeX has built-in support for it. I agree with revision history, Word probably manages it pretty good. But git repos aren't a bad option if you are used to them. I personally use Dropbox, so I have a simple revision history without problems. Anyways, I didn't say LaTeX was the perfect solution, that's why I said that he maybe had some impediment to use it instead of Office.
  - EricDeb 14y ago
    I think LaTeX is built for perfectionist, pedantic academics. That is not to say I don't secretly love it, but after spending hours battling the program trying to get it to look right, I usually end up asking myself what's the point?
    - dubya 14y ago
      That sounds like a LaTeX koan. If you really must use LaTeX, eventually you reach the state of just writing the content and to heck with the formatting, or you go nuts and learn to write a proper style file. You are pretty certain not to volunteer to write up the department newsletter with lots of pictures from the spring picnic.
- hristov 14y ago
  But that is not really fair is it. Apple is not supposed to have good Windows software to do Microsoft a favor. They should have good Windows software to do themselves a favor. Because people will be more likely to use their devices. And if the Windows software is excellent, Windows users will consider an Apple for their next computer. Now a Windows user hears about all the hoopla about how great Apple interfaces are, looks at iTunes and says "that cannot be true".
  - sophacles 14y ago
    My point was more that a company that makes an operating system probably puts it's best devs on the software for that OS. Further, there is probably not a lot of institutional knowledge of the other supported os. Lastly, there is probably some difficulty in getting good applicants with ".Net guys, come work at Apple", or "Objective-C dev? MS is hiring!". It reads like "come work for the enemy".
pluies_public 14y ago
Not so secretly apparently.

hristov 14y ago

Here is another example. Every time iTunes needs an update it brings up an automatic updater. Fair enough. I click on update, and the iTunes updater downloads the new version and every single time fails to install it with some generic unhelpful error. Then I have to go and manually download the new version from the website and manually install the new version. And every time a new update comes, I click "update" on the automatic updater hoping that this time they fixed it, but no such luck. I was so happy when iOS started updating without a computer.

gjulianm 14y ago

Another one for the collection: iTunes starts randomly. While doing some work, it suddenly starts up and shows in my screen. With no reason. There's no iPhone in my house. I didn't configure an iPhone with wireless sync with iTunes, and my WiFi is secured (nobody else than me accesed through it). And it still starts randomly, since the update that came with iOS5.

crazygringo 14y ago

Or how about: anything I do in iTunes makes it freeze for five seconds. It's been explained to me that this is because my music collection is around 200GB, so my iTunes Library.xml file is around 60MB, and any action (playing a song, renaming, etc.) rewrites the entire XML file on disk (incrementing play count, renaming, etc.). And this is on a MacBook Air with SSD under Lion!

evoxed 14y ago
Yep, this is extremely annoying. For an application that is supposed to catalog my library of media, it's quite inefficient with a large number of items. Without knowing what the possible solutions to this are, all I can say is that there needs to be a distinction between collections of media which are expected to be more reasonable in size (say an album, or one artist's catalog) and libraries which may grow to be quite huge. I have terabytes on external HDs that I won't let iTunes touch for a variety of reasons, leaving it pretty much no function other than to push things to the iPod or AppleTV.
koenigdavidmj 14y ago
Whose idea was it to use an XML file for a non-human-readable library file? SQLite would sing in this use case.
- derefr 14y ago
  There's a regular (possibly SQLite-based) database format as well. The XML file is the backup.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
My friends swear I'm an idiot, despite having written my own music library software because I couldn't stand the others, but I've had the same problem with iTunes being slow as shit. My initial import takes thousands of times the time it takes for other software to do the same thing and it has a nasty habit of "forgetting" where your library is if you don't leave it at the default. I love it, I just reloaded OS X and it keeps trying to start iTunes. Everytime I just deny the TOS and it slinks away. Good riddance.

weff 14y ago

Or the lack of the most basic elements of a media library: folder watching. No, I don't want one folder, I want to watch any folder. Seriously, how fucking complicated is that to implement?

evoxed 14y ago
Do you mean just to add media/quickview playlists, or to index the entire library? (assuming the latter) Given the default behavior of organizing all of your media within the iTunes directory, it makes perfect sense and would be a great feature. I'm sure there are other people more qualified to comment, but my first impression of the problem is that without some clever implementation there would be some major speed issues with large libraries.
- weff 14y ago
  By folder watching, I mean: when I put a multimedia file in in a folder (which I've assigned to be 'watched'), iTunes updates the library. I'm very certain Windows has APIs for exactly this kind of situation. In fact, if they can do it for one folder, I'm having trouble seeing a reason why they wouldn't be able to do it for several folders.
  - evoxed 14y ago
    You can do this with Applescript as a folder action. You can see how to do this here: http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/folderaction01.php http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/folderaction01.php I was thinking that you meant live monitoring, i.e. your library would be a reflection of your directory structure with additional metadata stored in unit sections so that it scales better.
    - weff 14y ago
      It's nice the Applescript exists (although I was talking more about Windows) but again, it's very sad one has to use an Applescript to accomplish this, on Mac. I mean, a solution is out there: very good. Nevertheless, it doesn't justify or excuse iTunes for not having this feature.

grecy 14y ago

<conspiracy theory> Apple is intentionally keeping iTunes on Windows a "sub-par" experience to attract more users to move over to MacOS. I think the majority of non-power don't understand the problem is with iTunes specifically, and would say something like "The whole damn computer sucks". </conspiracy>

evoxed 14y ago
0 errors 1 warning: unknown attribute 'theory' in tag 'conspiracy' I actually think I've heard this one before, especially when the software was just being released on Windows...
jsankey 14y ago
The biggest problem with this theory is that iTunes is hardly an enjoyable experience on OSX either!
- dazbradbury 14y ago
  It's only the comments in this thread that have made me realise iTunes is infuriating for everyone. Having never been an Mac OS user, I had always assumed they put all their effort into the Mac version, and then did some kind of nasty port and hacked away until a windows version worked. Not a conspiracy theory, so much as a lack of interest from Apple to make a decent windows version. On windows, I use winamp. It supports my iPod, and actually allows me to listen to and manage my music collection.
  - ImprovedSilence 14y ago
    +1 million for using winamp. By far the thing I miss most from windows. (I'm OSX and Linux all the way these days, but there are things I miss.)
benologist 14y ago
I think the conspiracy runs deeper .... they've made iTunes so specifically bad on OS X they're trying to drive users to linux where there is no iTunes at all!

alastairpat 14y ago

To be fair, it's pretty horrid on OS X as well - several of these issues apply cross-platform (iTunes WiFi sync error messages are presented to me on a daily basis running Lion, for example.)

Tomis 14y ago

That happens because Apple believes that whatever comes out of their hands is God's personal gift to mankind. The problem is not the software, the problem is you.

kprobst 14y ago

The one I love is when I create a playlist, verify it has songs in it (on iTunes), sync my iPod and the playlist is empty. Completely empty. Then the duplicate playlists that appear out of nowhere for whatever reason. But they're only duplicated on the device. Then there's the need to use a third-party hack to detect and remove dead tracks, or add new ones when I'm not purchasing musing from iTunes. As far as Apple is concerned, I must purchase my music from them, not from Amazon. So something so mundane as a folder watch isn't needed. It's unfortunate that we love the devices but have no choice but to put up with the horrid crap that is the software.

uslic001 14y ago

Which is why I have been using MediaMonkey as much as I can with my iPhone, iPad, and iPod. I hate when I am forced to use iTunes for an upgrade. It is like going to the dentist.

OzzyB 14y ago

6. Reboot? But I don’t want to reboot! I never understood why it has to have a system reboot either, and I'm on a Mac. I don't like rebooting, I just like to let my Mac sleep!

replax 14y ago
Well, they are probably replacing a file which is currently in use on which other files depend on. While there may be other solutions to that problem, rebooting is the least error prone one and people are already used to having to reboot their computer after updates.
- weff 14y ago
  That's a shitty excuse to reboot; sounds more like they didn't want to bother. If you do your job properly, errors can be handled. If you do your job properly, errors aren't simply hex values. Maybe people were used to reboot their computers 7 years ago but these days, you can entirely work and reboot only for system patches.
  - replax 14y ago
    Yes, you are obviously right. They obviously didn't want to put up with error handling, as you can tell by the crappy error messages they implemented. Basically, they said "fck it, just reboot".
- kijin 14y ago
  Anyone who uses Windows 7 is definitely not used to having to reboot their computer all the time. Most updates don't need a reboot. Heck, it's even possible to install the entire MS Office Suite and even some Visual Studio components without rebooting. But maybe Apple uses a toolkit that is supposed to be compatible with older versions of Windows as well. In that case, just reboot that dinosaur.

blhack 14y ago

I guess I'm the only one that doesn't have any problems with iTunes on windows, eh?

Karunamon 14y ago
Came to say something like this. I know that iTunes is everyone's favorite whipping boy, but with a 10,000 song library on a 5200RPM drive that's at least 6 years old.. I don't seem to be having all of these issues that everyone else does with the Windows iTunes. The worst problem I've had is error codes when trying to wifi sync, and that was solved by just disabling and reenabling the feature.

bluedevil2k 14y ago

The seemingly easiest UI concept is the most annoying. "Apply" != "Save and Immediately Sync". Why is there no way to simply change my settings without syncing?? Another annoying "feature" - iTunes handles syncing everything BUT pictures. Why?? Why do I need to open Windows to drag/drop the files in a folder?

icegreentea 14y ago

I think that several of these problems more or less just apply to windows programs in general. Its no excuse, but just something to keep in mind. Microsoft loves its cryptic error codes too.

navs 14y ago

Examples 2, 3, and 7 are common for me on OSX. I just hate syncing my device. Some of the other problems I've been having: iTunes gives me an alert saying some tracks can not be synced and so the sync process hangs until I close the prompt or manually stop the sync on my iPhone. If I remove a large app on my phone (example: the 1Gb Max Payne game) and then attempt to sync the phone after, iTunes decides to install the app again which means a lengthy transfer of a 1Gb file. If I make a change to my playlist on the phone and sync, two versions of the playlist are created (not always reproducible). iTunes is a horrible horrible experience on either OS. I've given up using it as a music player, in favor of Ecoute[1]. Pity I still need it for my iPhone. [1] http://www.pixiapps.com/ecoute/ http://www.pixiapps.com/ecoute/

jfb 14y ago

People would be surprised at the size of the team that produces the iTunes client.

politician 14y ago
1?
weff 14y ago
3 squirrels and 1 microbe?

beloch 14y ago

I don't even like iTunes on OSX.

moe 14y ago

At least on windows you have alternatives... I'm still looking for a viable replacement on OSX. Actually scratch that. More urgently I'm seeking a Finder-replacement that doesn't lock up for seconds at a time all the time. In 2012. On a 2 GHz computer. With a SSD. Truly magical!

shinratdr 14y ago
Why does it never occur to you people that your machine might have a problem? The Finder constantly locking up is not normal behaviour, no more than Windows Explorer locking up is normal behaviour. Why would you even think otherwise? Seriously, is this HN or YouTube? It's just ridiculous how whiny techs get when it comes to iTunes, OS X and iOS. I can solve an endless stream of technical problems all day with varying requirements and urgency, but syncing my iPhone is such a mystery! Give me a break. Here: Create a new partition on your drive, install a fresh copy of OS X. Does the Finder still lock up? No? What a surprise. OS X is a preferable OS for some people. It's not going to hold your hand and wipe your ass for you FFS, you still need to put in the slightest bit of effort.
shrike 14y ago
Check out Path Finder - http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/ http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/. I've been using for a while, it's light years beyond Finder. You can't completely kill Finder, OS X won't allow it but Path Finder makes it a lot better.
astrange 14y ago
If that's a third-party SSD, it's probably a hardware problem. You can generate a sysdiagnose report which will contain too much information by pressing ctrl-opt-cmd-shift-. when experiencing a problem. The spindump file inside it is quite readable to a systems programmer and may be helpful.

ntkachov 14y ago

I've always marveled at Apple. They have top notch Engineers working their hardware. They have fantastic Designers. But for some reason. Apple can't get a decent programmer. Their software sucks. Plain down right sucks. I love using apple hardware but I can't stand any software made by them. (See: Xcode, Itunes, Safari)

sebastianavina 14y ago
I guess they send all the talented one to the operating system division
- luriel 14y ago
  OS X is infamous for its bugs. See for example: http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/libev/ev.pod#OS_X_AND_DARWIN_BUGS http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/libev/ev.pod#OS_X_AN...
  - batista 14y ago
    I don't see anything "infamous" here. I see a page with some bugs that affect a specific library. It then goes on to mention bugs for other OSes that affect the same library.
batista 14y ago
>But for some reason. Apple can't get a decent programmer. Their software sucks. Plain down right sucks. I love using apple hardware but I can't stand any software made by them. (See: Xcode, Itunes, Safari) If you prefer Emacs/Vim, OK, but I can't see a much better tool than XCode for Objective-C (and arguably C/C++), plus UI building. Version 4 is buggy and crashes, but then again it's a mostly complete rewrite of the old XCode codebase. 4.3 is stabler than previous 4.x releases --it will get better. As for iTunes, I can't see any problem with it, besides handling a lot of different functionality in one app. Do you see many actual bugs in day to day use? Because using it for almost 10 years, I don't remember any. Safari, yes, tend to do some stupid things. Though, Chrome, to which I migrated is also based on Apple code for the core engine. Plus: the OS, Logic, Aperture, Pages, Keynote, all top notch apps.

vacri 14y ago

I haven't used iTunes for quite a while, but my gripe (on Windows at the time) was that it decided what your content was, presumably by file extension. "Please class these files as TV episodes, for my iPod Video, iTunes", to which iTunes would say "sorry, those are movies", and move them into the movie folder... never found out how to stop it from doing that.

JumpCrisscross 14y ago

I actually find the iTunes store on the iPhone to be quite terrible as well. It takes longer than any other app to power up and then greets you with a "Loading..." routine. In case you get over this it will do it again every time you switch to a different item on the menu, e.g. Search. It's like it's not sure of itself and must phone home before displaying the UI to, I don't know, show a user the "Purchased" screen. Same deal with the App Store and Mail apps. All very clunky.

replax 14y ago
Indeed! It wouldn't be too much to ask to cache what has been loaded WHILE the app is running, is it? Or even maybe keep it cached w/o the pictures. Hell, they could maybe poll 50 entries instead of 25 and cache it with no problem (excluding graphics). While I am at this, WHY does mobile safari have to reload a page every time i switch tabs/press the home button and instantly power it up again? It's not only hugely annoying on a non 3g device, it also makes no sense, you should at least be able to set an interval/turn it off...